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318 Western American Literature find themselves “facing East” awaiting a horde of white strangers who came to penetrate tribal homelands. Ella Clark’s work on Indian legends is there­ fore unique in presenting the beliefs and culture of a people soon to be overrun and confined to limited Reservations where tribal traditions soon disappeared from memory. B r ig h a m D. M a d s e n , University of Utah The Rim of the Prairie. By Bess Streeter Aldrich. (Bison Books. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. xi 4- 352 pages, $1.75.) The Home Place. By Dorothy Thomas. (Bison Books. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. 237 pages, $1.70.) Between 1920 and the end of World War II, the writers of popular fiction exploited the resources of farm and small-town life in highly success­ ful fashion. Year after year the major publishing houses turned out volume upon volume of such stories, most of them negligible either as art or as social commentary. In the later 1940s the vogue ended, more abruptly than it had begun, and urban or foreign settings became more characteristic of fiction designed for a mass audience. The fact that fewer and fewer Americans even have a farm or small­ town childhood to look back to probably has had something to do with the decline of rural fiction. Still, the appeal of the Western does not seem to diminish as the frontier recedes ever further into the irrecoverable past, and one would think that something of the old nostalgia for another kind of lost America should persist. Apparently the University of Nebraska Press thinks it does, for it has recently issued in paperback two representative products of the heyday of rural fiction. Bess Streeter Aldrich’s The Rim of the Prairie was first published in 1925, a year that saw at least nine novels of Middle Western farm life issue from the presses. Like practically all popular fiction of its time above the juvenile level, it is primarily a love story, complicated by a search for identity by a heroine whose origins are veiled in mystery. As the formula requires, the course of true love is beset with obstacles, some of which are introduced gratuitously and then removed rather casually when they have served their purpose. Not satisfied to tell a pleasant story, the author has to weigh her book with a thesis: the values of rural America, especially those of a Middle West still in touch with its pioneer beginnings, are superior to those of the Eastern cities. Both hero and heroine, though Western by birth, have imbibed false values through residence in the East and must undergo conversions. Yet the Reviews 319 reader is not surprised to see them return to the city after their marriage. The country may have a near-monopoly on moral virtue, but the city is where the money is. Dorothy Thomas’ The Home Place is both a less ambitious and a more effective performance. Set in Nebraska, like Mrs. Aldrich’s book, it recounts what happens when the three sons of Arch Young, thrown out of work by the depression, descend upon the “home place” and live there, with wives and children, in a congestion that inevitably produces tensions. Burdened with no message, no explicit contrast between town and country, the novel tells its unpretentious story in direct fashion. There are no locked drawers, no skeletons in the family closet, scarcely a love affair in the popular sense. The two main characters have been married for at least seven years and seem perfectly content to remain so. The reprinting of these books thirty years after the second of them was published probably does not betoken a resurgence of the genre they repre­ sent, but it does suggest that the appeal of such fiction has not altogether vanished. Even with all their defects, they are useful tools in understanding our national past. Though the picture of life they present may be distorted or falsified, the fact that it was presented and apparently read tells much about our Value system. Perhaps in time of the more realistic novels of the same period and locale, such as the...

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